Los Angeles Times
- Highly Recommended
"...The production, directed by Michael Matthews, concentrates intensely on the interplay between Guimarães and Lancaster. The actors, while adopting the English accents of their characters, bring their own individualities to the roles. "Bacon" is the kind of play that will transform through the particularities of its performers."
Stage and Cinema
- Highly Recommended
"...If you're in search of a play that simmers with tension before scorching the stage with raw, emotional fire, English playwright Sophie Swithinbank's Bacon, currently searing audiences at the tiny Henry Murray Stage upstairs at the Matrix, will leave you thoroughly singed-and perhaps a little brittle. Bacon is less a coming-of-age story and more a brutal autopsy of adolescent desire. Where others might offer tender nostalgia, Swithinbank serves up a narrative as sharp and unforgiving as a butcher's knife."
LA Splash
- Highly Recommended
"...BACON is an intense and powerful character study of two kids on the brink of growing up. As such, the play will definitely appeal to audiences interested in the evolution of people through stressful life events. Parents may also find the play involving as it examines the chaotic minds of youth and the unexpected steps they may take to develop the order of maturity. BACON is a perfect play for the intimate Henry Murray Stage (upstairs) in the Matrix Theatre. It is entertaining but also powerful and thought-provoking."
Stage Scene LA
- Highly Recommended
"...Wesley Guimar?es and Jack Lancaster deliver a pair of searing star turns as 19-year-old Londoners with an explosive shared past history in Sophie Swithinbank?s Bacon, brilliantly reconceived by director Michael Matthews for its West Coast Premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre."
Stage Raw
- Recommended
"...Set in the present day, the play unfolds in a series of flashbacks. Christopher Moscatielleo's essential sound design, with its whooshing water effects, effectively mirrors the psychic state of the characters, who are swamped in a rising tide of rampaging hormones and sexual ambiguity. In a tightly compressed staging, director Michael Matthews builds the action to harrowing intensity (although why, during scene breaks, do the performers repeatedly shift furniture to no apparent effect?)"
Peoples World
- Recommended
"...Award-winning British playwright Sophie Swithinbank's Bacon is a taut two-hander, a wringing, stinging sexploration of the fraught relationship between two troubled youths, Mark (Wesley Guimarães) and Darren (Jack Lancaster), set in London. Both are what used to be called, in social worker parlance, "products of broken homes." Mark, who is being raised by his immigrant mother, is of Brazilian background. Darren lives-no, resides is a better word-with his abusive, unemployed, drink-prone father, who is originally from Ireland."
Ticket Holders LA
- Highly Recommended
"...Designer Stephen Gifford has cleverly transformed the small attic-like playing space above the Matrix mainstage into a cramped London cafe, with blackboard menus on the walls and only a long wooden table and two benches as set pieces. From here, a socially inept young Cockney waiter named Mark (Wesley Guimaraes) tidies up the place as the audience files in, occasionally stopping to help a patron or two find seats or move chairs to offer the best view from one of the makeshift theatre's three sides."
Broadway World
- Highly Recommended
"...Bacon is the West Coast premiere of a simmering new drama at Rogue Machine on Melrose running through March 30th. Sinewy, raw, savagely intimate, Bacon is a spare two-person play by Sophie Swithinbank that grabs us hard and never lets us go, even for a second."
